MoRe ABoUt BeLiEf

Yet I am always with You; You hold me by my right hand. You guide me with Your counsel, and afterward You will take me into glory. Whom have I in heaven but You? And earth has nothing I desire besides you. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever. Psalm 73:23-26.

I believe Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the Living God, Messiah, Emmanuel, the One Who was, is and is to come.

I believe this with all of my soul.

Some can remain detached from their practice of belief as it regards their god. I can’t.

I see no purpose to studying belief in Jesus from a merely academic POV. I’ve found from experience attempting to grapple with an ethic’s truth from an outsider’s perspective leaves many of the realities within it obscured. To get a clear understanding of any truth one must either become an insider or listen to an insider’s POV.

I decided to become an insider, not from academic consideration, but because I saw no better option at the time. Some might consider me trapped by heritage and education; this would be a truth had I not been a teen in the post-60s thinking. As I considered Jesus, however, I realized I like Him, though I wasn’t all that impressed with religion bearing His name.

Belief is a tricky thing for us humans for we disguise our true desires many times by layering over them a venier of something else. The motives for doing this are as varied as there are personality types to have those motives. A couple I consider common: 1) Acceptance into a specific community we admire or traditionally belong to 2) Self deception, where we hate what we really are and smokescreen our internal reality from even ourselves so that we don’t have to deal with it.

When I decided to give myself over to a belief in Jesus, I realized I had never quite stopped believing in Him as the Christ. As the years went on, this foundational stance received earthquakes in the form of either seeming evidence to the contrary or hard knocks on the spiritual head where my assumptions found comfort. In other words, my self-perception and God-perception received pretty regular shakeups, and I believe these were to keep me from being too comfortable with known “realities” which were based on illusions I concocted for my personal preferences. Some of the shaking times I saw coming from years away, others surprised me, shocked me and shook me into thinking about the “truth” (I put that into italics because it was subjective and not necessarily factual) I assumed.

The journey from self-deception to God’s light of reality is story of a constant re-evaluation. We don’t see ourselves for who we truly are in Christ or as sinners. I don’t think we could handle it if we did, however, because our spirit’s weakened state would be completely broken by the knowledge. Instead we are given small bites of truth in order to lead us to the safety of the Spirit’s hospital, where God works on us in surgical ways as well as rehabilitating our atrophied faith muscle and spiritual being.

But back to our text above.

I like Jesus. I know I’m supposed to love Him, and I do, but I really like how He’s portrayed in the Gospels and elsewhere. I decided to throw my eggs all in one basket and go gungho for one God. I’ve bet all my money on red-3, set my heart on heaven and taken leave of my earthly senses in order to make heavenly sense things. I’m sure much of what I say on this blog sounds strange even to believers because my take on Scripture is just as skewed as theirs, but that can’t be helped. I’m done with tradition for the sake of tradition and will only adhere to those things that create an atmosphere where God is made real and vital.

I am always with Him, talking to Him, conscious of Him and aware of His presence. Even when I sin, I don’t get a break because He’s in the back of my mind waiting for me to get over my foolishness and turn to Him. Yet I don’t turn to Him out of guilt or mere conviction of my misdeed, rather I’m attached at the heart to my Master and I don’t want nor will I let go of Him. I have no desire to go anywhere else.